Whenever you work, chances are you need to concentrate to get the job done as best as possible. However our minds aren’t really tuned to be able to concentrate on one thing for hours on end, especially if its something monotonous and boring. If you love your job or hate it, use a work - rest rule to make yourself more productive and happier.

I often use a 60 -10 rule, which means is 60 minutes work, and 10 minutes of play or rest. I mainly devised this to keep my head, eyes and back from overstress, but it has a great psychological effect on me as well. I love what I do, but I look forward to the next 10 minute break when I can stroll around, paly a round of solitaire, just lay on the bed, or whatever I want. If you hate your job you will feel better knowing you only have to work through the hour and you can rest a bit, taking something bad an hour at a time is better than a day at a time.

If you work in front of a computer all day this will also have some health benefits, especially if you use the time to get away from your monitor. Stand up, do some exercise, walk around, stretch, do whatever you need to feel better, rest and get ready for the next hour.

I suggest creating your own rule, the one that works best for you, and also, not to be afraid of breaking it sometimes. Often I am very into something, and taking a 10 minute break would mean at least 30 minutes extra work, so it would be more productive to work 120 minutes and rest 20 just that once. You could also use a 90 -25 rule, or even a 90 - 90 rule, depending on how much you need to work, and how much rest you need to feel good.

You can extend this to the day level as well. Perhaps you hate taking breaks and would rather work 8 hours in one go, and having a long rest after that. In this case you could devise a 2 - 1 rule, where after every 2 days of work, you take 1 day off. This is of course only possible for those of you who work at home, but those of you who have an office job can utilize the hour based rule well.

During my dayjob my boss recommended an awesome application called RescueTime. Basically it is a simple app residing in the system tray that monitors what you do all the time. It periodically sends this data to the RescueTime server, and by logging on to your account you can view how productive or unproductive you were. I think this is one of the best productivity measurement apps I’ve ever seen, warranting it a bit more in-depth look on my part.

Setting up RescueTime

Setup is really easy, all you need to do is go to the RescueTime homepage and register for a free account. Once done, download the desktop application and install it (currently available for Windows and Mac). When you run the application it will reside in the system tray, right-click it and open the preferences. On the basic tab you can enter your registration details so the app knows where to send the data, and you can also set it to go to your dashboard with a double-click, I have this enabled.

On the advanced tab you can set the scanning interval of the application. I recommend you set this to a very low level, around 1-5 seconds. If you change windows very few times you can set it to a higher value, but it may lower the effectiveness of the logging. You can also set the time intervals between updates sent to the web. If you want to review your tasks every night I suggest setting it to around 15 hours, but you can also update manually using the button. I have it set to 5 minutes right now because I like my stats all nice and fresh, and I am also still in the process of setting things up.

In the privacy tab you can restrict your browser logging activity a bit, since RescueTime not only records that you are using your browser, but also the site you are looking at. You can create a whitelist by adding some entries, this will result in the app logging only those sites by name, others will be logged as “Other Websites”. You can also record only partial URL’s like “google.com” instead of “google.com/reader”, but both these options lower the effectiveness of the logging process, the fuller you record what you do the larger boost in productivity you could get with the app.

Using RescueTime

Now that we’ve got everything up and running its time to actually start using RescueTime. All you really need is to start working normally, the app will record what you do, and for how long. After you finish a few hours of work though, I suggest going to the dashboard and taking a look at some stats. Since you don’t have any tags yet, let’s make some, this will give you a lot of flexibility in monitoring your productivity.

Click on the Apps/Site List on the right and you will see a list of all the apps you have used. You will see that apart from Windows or Mac programs, you will also be presented with specific web pages you visited. You can click on Tag it! to add tags to each application. Once you add some, you will be able to view graphs on time spent on each tag and so on, which is very powerful on its own, but add tag rating to this and you really do have a productivity monitoring powerhouse.

If you click on all tags you will be able to rate each tag from -2 to +2 and based on this, RescueTime will calculate some valuable info for you. Once you are done, go to the dashboard and you will see some more stats now. You will see your efficiency level (time spent on productive activity vs distracting activity) and your productivity (compared to the RescueTime user base) level. I would mainly concentrate on the efficiency level, but trying to increase productivity could be a fun activity, and of course it forces you to be highly productive. You can also see various informative graphs about your top tags, top applications (time-wise) and total time spent.

Setting Goals and using RescueTime productively

Setting goals is a great help if you want to spend more time on a specific activity. Click on Goals and Alerts in the right sidebar and you will be able to add some specific goals in the form of “I want to spend 3 hours a day on blogging” for example. This info will be shown on the dashboard and you will see how you are doing. As all visual representations of data, it will be immensely helpful in bettering your performance.

The way to use RescueTime productively is to let it monitor you all the time. I found myself switching it off for 5 minutes, since setting up Netvibes for my girlfriend isn’t a normal activity in my day. I realized though that it is still an activity and should be logged, since in the long run, after thousands of hours it won’t make a difference too much and if it does, I won’t notice it if I always switch logging off.

Another way to use the app to maximize your productivity is to use the time views available. By analyzing your day to day performance, weekly performance, monthly performance and eventually yearly performance, you will be able to identify “trends” in your working method, and hopefully you will be able to extend high points in the graph and eliminate low points.

My RescueTime verdict

This application is the one I am most excited about and I will be covering it more in the future. The reason I love it so much is that after 20 minutes of setting up it will monitor your performance automatically, no need to constantly update, add tasks and so on. The beauty of it is that if you spend some extra time on it you will get 500 times the invested time back, but if you spend no extra time at all, you still benefit a lot.

GTD, or “Getting Things Done” is a recently developed work and time management technique that aims to get everything done by moving everything from your head, to somewhere else, where it can be organized and recalled easily any time.

The method is described by the mind behind it all, David Allen, in his book called (surprise) Getting Things Done. I have personally read the book, and while I don’t incorporate everything in there, it has some valuable information for everyone, even if you don’t adapt the whole idea.

The basic core of the GTD method contains five steps.

1. Collect
2. Process
3. Organize
4. Review
5. Do

These speak for themselves, but the actual background of these points is very well developed with great ways to do things. All of these can now be backed with software, I’m sure we’ll be reviewing many of these here on Hack Your Day.

The process can be a bit daunting at first, you may spend more time on it than it saves you, but you will see the rewards later. If you don’t have time to get into it, just remember the one tip of David Allen that is the most valuable I think. Do not keep anything in your head. Either do it immediately, record it somewhere to be done later or delegate it. This is a great way to keep your mind free and productive.

Getting Things Done, the book on Amazon
Getting Things Done on Wikipedia